Geithner: Auditing the Fed is a "line that we don't want to cross"

In an interview released today by Digg and the Wall Street Journal, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was pressured about the growing popular movement to Audit the Fed
spearheaded by Texas Congressman Ron Paul. A visibly uncomfortable
Geithner attempts to dismiss the question by stating "I'm sure people
understand that you want to keep politics out of monetary policy." When
Geithner is again pressed on the issue, he makes the stunning assertion
that conducting an audit of the Federal Reserve—something never before
done in its 96 year history—is a "line that we don't want to cross,"
proclaiming that such a move would be "problematic for the country."

Geithner's response that auditing the Fed would give politicians
dangerous control over American monetary policy is mistaken at best and
a deliberate lie at worst. Allowing the public to know what happened to
their $24 trillion in bailout money
does not give undue control of monetary policy to the people's elected
representatives. Instead, such an audit would finally allow the public
to see how their money has been spent in the midst of the largest
spending binge in the history of the world's economy, hardly an
unreasonable demand given the well-documented revolving door
between the Treasury and Goldman Sachs, the main recipient of bailout
funds. Ultimately, the Treasury Secretary is left spewing the absurdity
that "I think even the sponsor of that bill recognizes how important it
is to us to have the Fed independent of politics," which can only be
said to be true insofar as Ron Paul—the sponsor of House Resolution (HR) 1207— wants to abolish the Federal Reserve system altogether.

That
the Wall Street Journal would even pressure the Treasury Secretary on
serious issues like the Audit the Fed movement may be surprising, given
that the Wall Street Journal is a mouthpiece of the financial oligarchy
and that editor Paul Gigot, like Geithner himself, is a Bilderberg attendee.
Needless to say, this was not a typical inside-the-beltway interview.
Instead, questions were submitted and voted on by the Digg community,
with the top 10 questions being posed to Mr. Geithner.

As a result, the Secretary was bombarded by pointed questions about his documented tax evasion
from 2001-2004, the wisdom of spending trillions of dollars in the
light of long-term dollar devaluation and even, in the words of one
particularly irate questioner, "Why are you running the Treasury
Department?" Despite presumably having had time to prepare responses to
each question well in advance, Geithner is still visibly discomfited by
the entire exchange, picking at his shirt cuff and coughing nervously
throughout the interview.

In one particularly telling
moment, Geithner even admits "We have been forced to do just
extraordinary things and, frankly, offensive things to help save the economy."

That these questions are only being asked now,
almost a

year into the bailout and several months after the new
administration has taken office, further highlights how the controlled
corporate media is doing everything in its power to keep to
well-trodden and uncontroversial areas in their interviewing of key
administration officials. This interview is testimony to the power of
the citizen journalism movement

that is attempting to hold those in power accountable for their
actions. We can only hope that the Obama Administration lives up to
their promise to be the "cyber" administration by allowing more such
question-and-answer sessions in the future.